Monday, September 9, 2002 issue.
Sept. 11 — One Year Later I: Weapons of Mass Destruction Are Top Threat
By Bryan Bender
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON — Last year’s terrorist attacks on the United States, followed quickly by the still-unsolved anthrax letter spree, forced U.S. intelligence agencies to re-evaluate the potential for catastrophic terrorism. Officials now are coming to grips with the prospect that future attacks might involve weapons of mass destruction that could make the Sept. 11 death toll pale in comparison.
A year into the war on terrorism, after ousting the al-Qaeda terrorist network from its safe haven in Afghanistan and piecing together numerous clues about the group’s plans, the threat from chemical, biological, nuclear or radiological weapons is now the top U.S. intelligence community priority, according to intelligence officials and private experts.
National security officials have long feared the use of mass casualty weapons on the part of rogue nations as well as nonstate actors such as terrorist organizations. New intelligence gathered during the past 12 months, however, points for the first time to both the capability and intent on the part of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups to develop and deliver such weapons against civilian and military targets at home and abroad.
In the policy arena, meanwhile, the threat of weapons of mass destruction has led to a historic shift in U.S. defense strategy in the post-Sept. 11 world to a policy of pre-emptive attack. The Bush administration has set a course for possible military action against Iraq by using Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s suspected covert and outlawed WMD program — including new revelations about his pursuit of nuclear weapons — as justification for launching a war (see related GSN story, today).
The aim would be to prevent catastrophic weapons from falling into the hands of terrorist groups, or from being used by the Iraqi regime to threaten the United States or regional allies. The pre-emption policy, however, is expected to go beyond the threat of Iraq.
Indeed, the Bush administration’s new national security strategy, to be released this fall, is expected to identify the pre-emption of WMD programs as a pillar of U.S. defense posture in the new century.
Pre-emption depends on accurate and timely intelligence, however, and while government officials say gathering intelligence on WMD threats — and the terrorist groups and state supporters who are seeking to acquire and weaponize them — is now a top priority, the intelligence community still has a long way to go in improving its ability to effectively predict potential WMD attacks, according to government officials and private experts.
Wake-Up Call
U.S. officials and private experts look to the New York, Washington and Pennsylvania attacks, and even more so to the anthrax letter mystery, as a wake-up call to a threat that had been looming on the horizon for years but remained largely hypothetical in national security and intelligence circles.
“Before Sept. 11, the threats from weapons of mass destruction and terrorism were treated for the most part as ugly abstractions and not likely to materialize, even though they had done so in the recent past,” said John Newhouse, senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information and former assistant director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
“The world post-9/11 has not really changed,” added Tim Sample, staff director of the House Intelligence Committee. “The audience has changed and people are now willing to listen,” he told an audience at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington in June.
As a result, weapons of mass destruction have now become a top priority for the nation’s spy agencies, according to one U.S. intelligence official. The “priority intelligence requirements” generated by the nation’s political leadership are more commonly focused on identifying WMD-related threats than ever before, the official said. “WMD has probably moved to the top of that list,” the official said.
According to John Pike, an intelligence expert at of Globalsecurity.org, the intelligence community has benefited from an enormous budget increase in the wake of Sept. 11, much of which has gone to counterterrorism. Of the estimated $3 billion to $4 billion in new spending in the past year, a significant percentage is believed to have gone for WMD-related intelligence efforts, he said. “Not much was being spent on WMD” prior to the terrorist attacks, Pike said.
The new emphasis on the threat from chemical, biological and nuclear weapons was also generated in part by a scare last October, in which U.S. officials mistakenly believed a small nuclear device may have been smuggled into the United States by al-Qaeda, intelligence officials said. Washington placed the elite Delta Force on alert before the intelligence was deemed inaccurate, but has maintained a “shadow government” in an undisclosed location in the event Washington suffers a WMD attack.
WMD Threat Shifts From States to Terrorist Groups
Intelligence officials point out that while countries’ WMD arsenals have been a cause for concern for decades, it is the emergence of the transnational threat — terrorist groups seeking weapons of mass destruction whose actions may not be deterred by overwhelming U.S. military retaliation — that has given them the most pause and forced them to rethink their approach to the WMD threat.
“Before you were generally talking about states like Iran, Iraq and North Korea,” named by President George W. Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address as members of an “axis of evil” for their development of weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorist groups, said CIA spokesman Paul Nowack. “Now you’re talking about nonstate actors like al-Qaeda that may be getting these weapons. The concern has increased.”
That is not to say that states with WMD arsenals do not continue to be a concern, especially countries such as Pakistan, a nuclear power with a strong Muslim extremist bloc seeking to overthrow the secular government of General Pervez Musharraf, a key U.S. ally in the war on terrorism. Concerns about Pakistan’s instability, heightened by the U.S. war in neighboring Afghanistan, renewed concerns about Muslim extremists acquiring an “Islamic bomb.”
But the threat from transnational actors may be more difficult to assess than a country, particularly for an intelligence community previously more occupied with monitoring enemy armies.
“WMD is different to Iraq than it is to al-Qaeda,” said a senior intelligence official. “They [al-Qaeda] have to use it asymmetrically.” In other words, determining if a state such as Iraq is planning to unleash weapons of mass destruction in a missile attack, for example, is considered less challenging than gauging the activities of a terrorist organization without a traditional army that can operate inside U.S. borders.
Asymmetric warfare is defined as employing unconventional tactics to achieve a disproportionately high impact.
Such nontraditional means of delivery, in fact, are what make assessing the threat so difficult, according to intelligence officials. “The intelligence community doesn’t have the means to monitor every means of delivery,” the intelligence official said.
For example, the official believes that, based on newly gained intelligence, it is more probable that a terrorist will use WMD materials acquired in the United States rather than attempt to smuggle in a chemical, biological or radiological device from another country.
Mounting Evidence
Intelligence officials maintain that they were aware well before Sept. 11 that Osama bin Laden and his organization planned to acquire chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
Intelligence officials said reports in the late 1990s indicated that, among other efforts, bin Laden operatives were seeking to acquire a Russian nuclear device on the black market. Al-Qaeda is not believed to have been successful in its search for a former Soviet nuclear weapon. A scare in October 2001 arose, however, from an intelligence report suggesting al-Qaeda may have smuggled a nuclear device into the United States.
“Nothing has been gathered to change our view of al-Qaeda,” said the intelligence official. “We were on the mark there. We are at war with a terrorist organization with an interest in WMD and they have every intention of using it.”
Nevertheless, the toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan gave U.S. intelligence agencies a new view into the workings of the al-Qaeda terrorist network, which the extremist Islamic regime had harbored since 1996.
U.S. Central Command officials have scoured an estimated 50 sites in Afghanistan suspected of being part of rudimentary al-Qaeda efforts to develop chemical and biological weapons. Military officials have declined to discuss the details of what they have found.
Meanwhile, an al-Qaeda video library acquired by CNN in Afghanistan last month depicted al-Qaeda chemical tests on dogs in Afghanistan, possibly using a nerve agent (see GSN, Aug. 20).
Al-Qaeda WMD concerns have also moved beyond chemical, biological and nuclear threats to crude radiological weapons.
In June, U.S. officials arrested U.S. citizen Jose Padilla, a suspected al-Qaeda operative, while he tried to re-enter the country from Pakistan. Intelligence officials believe he may have been part of a plot to carry out a so-called dirty bomb attack in the United States by combining conventional explosives with radioactive material that can be found in industrial or medical activities (see GSN, Sept. 3).
The extent of the terrorist WMD threat, however, remains largely a mystery. A case in point are the anthrax letter attacks that quickly followed the September 11 attacks and, almost a year later, remain unsolved (see GSN, Sept. 3). Gaining a better understanding of the psychology and socio-political culture of would-be terrorists has therefore also taken on added urgency in the last year in an effort to predict their behavior.
Psychological and Social Profiling
One way to improve WMD intelligence, officials believe, is to do a better job of profiling potential terrorists who might acquire weapons of mass destruction. While intelligence agencies attempted to predict terrorist activities prior to September 11, there is renewed interest in using novel techniques to help predict their behavior (see GSN, July 16).
“It’s certainly within the realm of terrorists to use chemicals against us,” said Stephen Younger, director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said in a recent interview. “They have not done that yet. We’d like to understand better why and how to keep it that way.”
Several programs initiated after Sept. 11 are designed to profile the psychological, social and political attributes of terrorists threatening to unleash WMD attacks.
One being pursued by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is called “Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment” and is seeking to develop predictive technology to better anticipate and act against terrorist threats. Test results have already demonstrated the feasibility of developing automated and adaptive behavior prediction models, according to DARPA.
“There are currently over 400 organizations and 20 countries considered hostile to the United States and its allies,” said Larry Ellis, the DARPA program manager. “These organizations and countries are gaining access to weapons of mass destruction at an increasing rate. As a result of this heightened threat, the United States is shifting its focus from conventional to asymmetric operations.”
Another related effort is a classified study into the “understanding of decision-making strategies of potential users of unconventional weapons of mass destruction,” the Pentagon said. It is utilizing a proprietary profiling method called Biocom, developed by the Evolutionary Services Institute, a Bethesda, Md., consulting firm. The secret psychological profile study hopes to determine the types of unconventional weapons that terrorists might use.
Efforts to get inside the mind of potential terrorists demonstrate the level of difficulty intelligence officials envision in accurately assessing the WMD threat posed by al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
Criticism and Challenges
While the WMD threat is believed to be growing, nailing down specifics, such as who is developing or seeking to purchase them, what kinds of materials are being pursued and how close nations or terrorist groups are to having them in an effectively deliverable form, is proving extremely difficult, officials said.
“We have not made many strides since I’ve been here in improving the intelligence take,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a town hall meeting of military personnel in early August.
Critics charge, for example, that there still doesn’t exist a single place within the U.S. intelligence community to go for WMD-related intelligence. “One problem DTRA — a consumer of intelligence — has had is there isn’t a go-to place for intel,” said Pike.
He believes that only “1 percent of the intelligence community” is dedicated to the WMD mission.
“I think the Bush administration is highly negligent,” said Stansfield Turner, former CIA director. “We’re missing the boat here in focusing attention of the problem of weapons of mass destruction.”
Intelligence officials, however, maintain that the community is nearly overwhelmed in the wake of Sept. 11. Combined with traditional terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism and growing instability in the Middle East, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is testing the limits of the U.S. intelligence community, a senior intelligence officials acknowledged in June.
“It is the convergence of these threats that has put the intelligence community to its greatest test,” said Joan Dempsey, deputy director of central intelligence for community management, told an audience at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington in June.
Added CDI’s Newhouse: “Now we recognize the threats as being too real but difficult to assess in terms of their imminence and gravity.”
“What we are dealing with is a low probability, high consequence event,” said DTRA’s Younger. “The consequences associated with an attack are so great that the president is exactly right to raise the priority of reducing the threat of weapons of mass destruction.”
Copyright 2002 Global Security Newswire
